I've changed the blog design today. It looks much prettier than before I think, but there are some glitches still to iron out. It seems that the text editing has been screwed up a bit. I've figured out how to get it looking normal, but I will not go back through almost 700 posts to fix them all. Maybe I'll go back a couple of weeks. There are some other cosmetological things to figure out as well. Please bear with me as I try to get this to
All thinking people - I think! - doubt. Obviously, thinking itself is a sort of practiced doubt, where you entertain and evaluate ideas different from the ones you have inherited. But there's is another sort of doubt, a deeper doubt, of a more existential sort. I want to use general, religiously non-specific language here, because though my doubt have tended to be religious, I presume doubt comes in secular forms too. So let's call this existential kind of doubt a crisis of ultimate concern. It's when the things most precious to you, the things that are the absolute borders and building...
Glenn Peoples raises a very, very good point about "progressive" Christians and our attitudes and behaviours towards Mark Driscoll: So many of Mark’s most vocal and unkind attackers are among those who deem themselves to be “progressive” Christians, who among other things see themselves as part of a movement stressing the love of God for others. And yet, while they love to tell others that Jesus said that we should love our enemies, they throw stones at their brother. You might think that Mark is honestly mistaken about the three doctrinal issues I outlined above. You might, for...
On his blog, Feser says, I argue that it is impossible in principle to get from the world to the God of classical theism unless we affirm the act/potency distinction and (therefore) the reality of immanent final causality. Along the way I deal with Greek atomism, Berkeley’s critique of matter, the nature of divine causality, the existential inertia thesis, the problem with Leibnizian cosmological arguments, the limitations of the Kalām argument, and some other stuff as well. Jonathan Sanford also makes some important points in his reply, which follows my
As you might have gathered, since I've mentioned it in passing, my wife is pregnant. Baby number two is set to arrive in late April. That's exciting for all of us, but none so much, it seems, than Lý, our 3-year old daughter. She's obsessed with babies - and the baby! Everyday she wants to play doctor and have us listen to and fix her belly, which she pushes out to make it as big as possible. She's obsessed with the different roles in a family, too, and she assigns different roles for all of us all the time. Sometimes I'm the baby and she's the father, or she's the mother and her mom is...
I completely agree with what Pam Hogeweide and the women in this video are saying. And I fully support Pam's efforts, I'm happy that the book exists and I hope it will lead to many successes, for her and for the church. My only small beef about the video is with the word "servant" being used as denoting something negative. I know, "servant" can be and is oppressive. It can be a "spiritual" word used to assign women inferior roles in church and keeping them there. And it's necessary to point that out. But "servant" is how we Christians should see ourselves, especially in church, because...
Evangel Cathedral! Click it. Just click it. Amazing! Unbelievable. Update: Ok, the same guy made the intro for the International Congress for Churches and Ministries. Very... rad,
We got this from Malan's grandmother. It's our daughter, Lý's, family tree, going back five generations. She researched our families herself and filled out the names and dates by hand. I imagine it's going to be on our wall for decades. It might even become something of an heirloom. I hope it will. As I've said before, moving back to the Faroes last October has reminded me how very important family is. Not that saying family is important is by any means profound. That's about the most obvious thing anyone could say. But my personal realisation of it in these last months has been...
I've been listening to King's X a lot lately. Such a good band. It struck me, as I listened to "Dogman" for the thousandth time in my life, that King's X write really good songs about prayer. Listen to the two below. Those are some really good songs about prayer. It's interesting to note the spiritual changes that band has gone through over the years by comparing these two songs about prayer. In the former, they remember "the times I prayed", whereas in the latter they seem to have given up on prayer, saying "If you really do believe/Don't forget to pray for me." I say "they", but I don't...
It has been a royal weekend in the Danish kingdom (of which the Faroe Islands are a part). We have celebrated the 40th anniversary of Queen Margrethe II's reign. That's probably not very interesting to most of you, which is fine, because it's not what I wanted to say anything about anyway. What I did want to share was this rather amazing performance of "May It Be" from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack by my friend and old classmate Eivør Pálsdóttir. She performed it at a special concert celebrating the queen and her reign on Saturday night. Breathtaking performance. Why a song...
